The antidote to ideologies

If Britain is being run by a smarter sort of Shapps, why does Labour want a Kinnock sort of Corbyn?

Clueless as ever and still addicted to the politics of media, the Labour Party has gone from National Treasure to “What’s your pleasure?”

“I really don’t know why you’ve got it in for Grant Shapps,” a softish-right wing friend of mine remarked two years ago, “he’s come from nothing and made his way to the top….I’d have thought you of all people would admire that”.
It would take the best part of a book to deconstruct that opinion, because to my mind it lacks any logic or discernment, so one would have to do it word by word. However, the Sun headline is, ‘because he’s a wide-boy liar who conned his way to wealth’. I’m not going to lose a good friend as a result of this post, because he doesn’t read The Slog: “It’s never less than lively or amusing, but to be honest I think you make most of it up” is the one answer he ever gave on the subject of why not.
My chum is part of the Passive Acceptance Naivety Tendency Sector (PANTS) and he prefers life that way: the use of words like decadent, depraved, psycho, odd, and sociopathic in relation to middle class Ministers of the Crown he regards as only a small step away from treason…and so it will come as no surprise that he’s solidly behind the Camay soft-soap of anti-NVE legislation, and all the threats to plurality it brings with it as hand luggage.
His attitude is a very British one, from which my parents also suffered: give these people a cardboard goose-stepping maniac covered in military regalia and sporting a silly moustache, and they will say “Yes, I-Spy Nazis”. But shave off the sub-nasal toothbrush, add a posh accent – and swap the jackboots for impeccable tailoring with shiny sensible shoes – et voilà! Jolly good chap and safe pair of hands, what?
To stay on message within the Conservative fold, The Peeps from Pants will tolerate seamy little graft merchants like Shapps….just so long as they mind their manners. The golden rule, if I may go all Betjeman here, might be defined thus:

Come all you carbon copy Grantsyou’re welcome in my pair of Pants –but if you set out to deprave,pretend you know how to behave.

No such conditionality is applied to the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Timothy Yeo, Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron, for they’re all chaps schooled in the values of the oval ball, and no-balls at the Oval: the game’s the thing, Up School, the Officer Class, and all that. Hunt, a self-serving scoundrel using family connections? Yeo, a bender of taxi pollution statistics who snaffles brown envelopes stuffed with cash? Boris Johnson – a serial shagger who hires heavies to threaten people? George Osborne has a crack habit? David Cameron, a master of grubby cover-ups to do with Newscorp, HSBC, Joint Enterprise and Saudi arms deals? Are you mad sir? Or are you an NVE, eh? Well if so, we’ve got you taped – you little oik.

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So then: the triumph of Camerlot codswallop is entirely down to those who prefer comfortable PANTS, right? On the contrary: join me now in a trip down Leftie Lane, and observe how what used to be the Labour Party has become everything designed to alienate the decent citizen and the open-minded voter….such that, when a genuine opponent of Friedmanite drivel becomes leader, the first (and only) instinct of the Party establishment is to strangle him at birth.
Following the disaster of Michael Foot and over-confidence of Kinnock, the early demise of John Smith ushered in the era of Blairite spin bollocks under the watchful eye of Alistair Campbell, and anal control-freakery of Peter Mandelson. The dominant Labour tribe at this time were the heirs of Tony Crosland, whose Future of Socialism tract at the outset of the Sixties was a veiled attempt to suggest that ‘cloth-cap’ Socialism had no future at all.
Crosland was right, but the Blair Project took this a giant step further by saying that power was the only Party objective with any validity. And once he had power, Teflon Tony replaced the aim of querying neoliberal ideas with one of embracing them. It was, if you like, a classic case of no definable Ends justifying the anything-goes Means.
In an extraordinary irony, the Blairites kept the Party unified by the wholesale adoption of US-style ‘liberal’ pc in relation to feminism, minority sexualities, multiculturalism, immigration and unquestioning support for the EU. And to cement their image for being ‘safe hands’ and grown-up, most of them joined in enthusiastically with Dubya Bush’s knee-jerk War on Terror after 9/11.
Such an attempt (successful on the whole in electoral terms) would have been described by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels as National Socialism. But the effect on Labour’s traditional core vote was devastating: huge swathes of older supporters drifted away – as did young people on benefits – while those who regarded most of the pc/EU agenda as complete bollocks began to look at other alternatives to the emerging Camerlot.
In the 2010 Election debates, two things were clear: Gordon Brown was a turn-off, and Nick Clegg was the man who promised everything as if he meant it. The surge in LibDem support delivered a Tory-led Coalition, and – thanks to the TUC – saddled Labour in Opposition with the ultimate personification of Metrochique liberal nonsense, Ed Miliband. Five years later, the voters also virtually destroyed the LibDems (again, largely by not turning up) after Clegg’s failure to deliver anything – or take the existential crisis in the EU seriously.
After 2011, that crisis began to arm UKip with stronger and stronger arguments in favour of Britain leaving the European Project. It also armed them with 13% of the vote – by any measure a staggering achievement – but under the ‘rules’ of the UK winner-takes-all electoral system, just one seat. In Scotland, meanwhile, half as many votes gave the SNP 60 seats and wiped out the Scottish Labour Party.
Faced with a desperate situation in which two forms of nationalism were cutting a swathe through their natural franchise, the Labour big beasts sort of ummed and aghed. There seemed no learnings at all from the failure of Miliband Rightonism to engage with the voters, 40% of whom were no longer voting for anyone. Only Jeremy Corbyn saw the lack of connection for what it was: by Autumn, he was voted leader by an overwhelming popular margin among Party members.
Although Corbyn himself is a somewhat robotic member of the International Socialist pc wing of the Labour Party, the reaction of Labour’s Establishment – the people who no longer appeal to anyone outside Highgate – was that the Party had been stolen from them, and must be won back. It seems highly possible this coming week that the Oldham by election (where quite deliberately, the Conservatives are not standing) will hugely reduce Labour’s majority, handing a creditable performance to UKip. Corbyn will, of course, shoulder the blame for this; having had sight of some constituency research last week, however, my reading would be that with the leadership change, in a high-unemployment, high immigrant area Labour will do better than otherwise. (The Corbynistas, by the way, can point to Jeremy’s support within the Party being even higher now than the level that so convincingly elected him leader).
Now a teddy bear might analyse where the Party is today, and say “what we need is a person with Corbyn’s principles and without his baggage”. But being the conclusion of a bear of very little brain, it’s a nonsense. Corbyn has baggage because he has principles: they come with the territory. The Labour Old Guard, by contrast, is a bear of no brain at all: its solution will be to put up another slithery type like Andy Burnham, and pretend he has principles.
This is the bottom line: Labour’s Establishment view is that if the more subtle Shappses of this world are what makes MOR voters happy, then that’s what the Labour Party needs. It isn’t: what the Labour Party needs now is to re-engage with the losers in Cruel Britannia, and join in with Mr Corbyn as a means of both showing they mean business, and saving the guy from himself. So far, the evidence is that he is open to the application of pressure and does behave like a house-trained radical rather than feral Occupier.
But the Party won’t do that, because the Party mainstream suffers from Death of the Soul. Mrs Thatcher put the soul-food poison in the rat-run, and under Blair, Labour ate it. The Party of the Underdog has been rendered Top Catatonic. Britain desperately needs a replacement Opposition, but for the life of me I can’t see one coming.

Sorry JW. Where do you conjure thirteen million ukip voters from ? Only four odd mill voted for them in 2015. Or are you somehow doublecounting a lot of these ‘ cause they voted ukip at Euro elections ?

I believe what we have had for the last 30years or more is “democracy light”. We get to vote but don’t have any choices .
Re Jeremy Corbyn , I would probably never vote for him , a bit ethereal in the sense of a bit airy in policies but more principled than most .
I do remember John Major saying just before we went into Iraq, yes we can win this battle , but nobody Has planned what the aftermath will be, and look how well that went and I think there is a parallel for Syria which Mr Corbyn is highlighting .Nobody seems to have an end game strategy so for inducing the government to think twice before we wade in again I would applaud him.

“Corbyn has baggage because he has principles.” Superb JW. I have been disgusted at the behaviour of so many of the Parliamentary Labour Party who are not supporting Corbyn’s stance on Syria and are actively undermining him. The disconnect between the ‘losers’ in Cruel Brittania and the Parliamentary party that supposedly represents them is complete. Politics throughout the Western world lies in ruins with control totally in the hands of a psychopathic oligarchy and their minions.

Perhaps the most fundamental question for the Labour Party is what the nature of economic activity is going to be in the 21st century? As automation wreaks havoc on work prospects across the traditional sectors of labour voters, what answer is the Labour Party going to have for them? Owners of capital will invest in robots and machines, not humans and as that process rolls out more and more people will get poorer and poorer as a small subset become richer and richer.

The real question is this: when is enough wealth enough? I mean: really, what can do with more than £1bn? Even living off the interest of the interest, that’s £10m a year to live off, which is so much more than anyone needs, even for a family of 4. Anyone who says the rich can’t earn 10% a year needs to educate themselves. The reason they’re that rich is because they CAN earn 10%+ a year, each and every year.

The 21st century battle will be the existential one: humans vs robots? The wealthy will back robots, the poor will either give up and die or back humans. The richest can now go to war without human soldiers, using drones, cyberwarfare and controlling the weather using HAARP. They will be able to run farms without human labour and mines will be automated too.

The real question is why they have such a need to eliminate their fellow humans? And why they think that no humans will react by saying: ‘you want to destroy us, we’ll destroy you then’?

It may not get ugly before 2030, but if we have cooling for 15 years up to 2031, allied to the uber-rich aiming to turn 40% of humanity into fossils, dinosaurs etc etc, then trouble will come………

I have to say that I don’t think that the uber-rich will respond to appeals to decency any more than ISIL will.

So the real question is going to be what they actually will respond to………

Yeah. When we had that voting reform referendum thingy early in the last parliament, all the parties of the Left couldn’t run away from sharing a platform with Niggles Farseache. The words ‘hoisted’ and ‘petard’ spring to mind.

I would never vote Labour, the party that brought in the smoking ban. I won’t ever vote Lib Dem again, who aided and abetting them in mutilating a really fantastic industry in the UK economy. I can’t vote Conservative again until they properly review the evidence of the effects of said ban and stop racing the Australia to scoop the ASHes.

The technology exists, actually exists (h/t Las Vegas) to remove smoke quickly and efficiently from rooms before it hits a big nose, pinch face, jumped up Little Hitler without any legs… secondhand. But no, It’s Health issue, we must remove these foul smelling, children poisoning oiks from polite society *cough, cough* doncha know.

I actually agree with Corbyn on no more bombs needed in Syria thanks … now putting 20k soldiers on the ground to stabilise an area for the Syrian population think that would be a good idea, but Cameron won’t do that. If anything it should be championed in the UN but guess what? He won’t do that neither …

What I want to know most of all is “why does the UK need the house of commons and lords when it is only US directives we are carrying out? We could save millions, maybe billions just letting the US tell us what to do and save ourselves having to pay for our elected elites pretending to hold a democracy when there it is no such thing.

A PUZZLE, IF WE GO TO BOMB AN ISIS POSITION WILL THE US BE DROPPING LEAFLETS AGAIN TO RUN AWAY FROM THESE UK BOMBS RENDERING THE WHOLE CONCEPT HILARIOUS AND THE UK HIT RATE 0% EXCEPT FOR CIVILIANS.

I am interested also in the concept of all politicians in parliament have been bribed or big kudos on just wanting to paint their name on the next bomb dropped on Syria “Cameron Girl” or maybe “Andy Burnhams Little Boy”. Stuff it, make it a national raffle, buy a ticket for a £1 and get your name painted on a bomb.

As for Corbyn, I have never seen such a witch hunt on a man as the MSM are carrying on right now. I am appalled to be honest, but if anything by him being treated in such a way just reaffirms to me there is no longer a democracy in the UK where debate is permitted.

Now I know, just from expressing my point of view to others many concur with my feelings, Syria does no need more bombs! It does need stabilising however but if you are not prepared to put ground troops just like the US then you should withdraw. Although I reckon the Turks are going to be the allies army but watch for the Kurds get wiped out in the process just to get rid of them.

rtj, that is such a thought provoking comment. I’ve been wondering recently, just why on earth these already ‘stinking rich’ people want more and more and more. The only answers I can come up with are greed and power. I hope and pray that, eventually, the majority of people will have the nuance to stand up to these utterly evil people but what does it take to get them out of their comfort zones and rebel? Starvation, I imagine and I don’t mean just food.

Jeremy Corbyn has struck a chord with many old Labourites and young idealists, who have rejoined the Party. He advocates returning the State assets by Nationalisation. But he has really put the wind up the criminals in the City of London by proposing the return of the power to create money to the Govt. by Peoples QE.
For this he must be destroyed, by villification, by demonisation, by derision. etc.All the Goebbel tools of character assassination.
There is a resistance movement against Neo-liberalism incubating around Corbyn and it must be strangled at birth to maintain the cozy status quo of looting the people and the State.
The Blairites are the ‘enemy within’ the Labour Party, led by Chukka Umunna and will need to be faced down,if this small flowering of decency in Politics is not be be smothered at birth.
I do not believe the return of Labour to power can be achieved in 2020 by a Labour led by Corbyn. I do beleive he can be the catalyst for a more decent,principled and effective Opposition until a return to power..
He needs first to clean the Augean stables of the detritus bequeathed by Blair. A younger man hopefully will arise to carry Labour forward.
Tory near monopoly of the organs of Communication via the MSM and BBC is a massive handicap for Labour.
Oldham by-election will give us an idea of the damage or otherwise of the MSM propaganda machine against Corbyn.

Very noticeable that Eliot Johnson / Clarke scandal is being back burnered already with Tory “enquiry requesting evidence” and due to report in 2016. Partially O/t but Lowell Goddard abuse enquiry doesn’t appear to mention Richmond Council / Elm house along with Rotherham etc. This is apart from announcing a 5yr (!) i.e post Gen Election projected timescale.

How can one possibly judge form to pick an opposition when the only noise is all about hypothetical bombing of syria with three extra aircraft, which any practical minded person will tell you is a complete waste of time and money.
This is the level of acumen that we have today in westminster. That is the how taxpayers money is spent today, plus of course the other house of imbeciles – brussels. Result, we are all going nowhere fast.

It has been informative to see just who is most vociferous in their smearing of Corbyn in the mass media. Much as I am now beginning to see the free-fall destruction of Building 7 as a litmus test for those prepared to speak the truth, demonisation of Corbyn has the effect of outing the gate-keepers on the ‘Left’. The BBC and Guardian are now exposed as wholly captured agents of the Neoliberals on an almost daily basis.

Slightly O.T. Tony Rooke who argued successfully that paying his BBC Licence fee was in effect funding terrorism and therefore an offence has produced an informative documentary on the basis of his argument. It may be found on Youtube by searching for “incontrovertible documentary”.

Jeremy Stocks – when you realize that there are 29,000 flights in Europe on an average working day, is it any surprise that they get to play noughts and crosses? Now the information I am still seeking is just how much fuel these 29,000 flights consume. If it is as little as ten tons per flight, that’s well over a quarter of a million tons of fuel a day!

My point is that if you consider the engine (in very broad terms at least) as needing the gas-turbine equivalent of fuel conditioners and anti-pinking agents, even at 1% of the fuel, that is a very large figure indeed.

As an example, the newest Airbus (320neo) carries 17 tons of fuel for a maximum 4,000km range. Only a considerable amount of fuel will be used on take-off. Short haul flights would reduce its range considerably.

In this respect, con-trails are the airborne version of the traffic pollution one has in urban areas.

I have no particular affiliation to any party, there are elements of all of them that I find unpalatable if not disturbing. This extends to newspapers. I now rely on people like JW to tell me what’s happening and why. Having said all of that, I quite like old Corbyn. There is something of the decent person about him that I think resonates with a lot of people. With more confidence in himself and less stabbing in the back from his party I think he could be a credible PM. He would have to listen to the electorate on issues like bombing Syria. Or am I fooling myself and really, he’s a bit too soft? I don’t know but still, I like the man.

John Ward, I doubt for one moment that you missed the thought that the Lib-Dem voters didn’t vote because they knew that their votes would be wasted? After all, in the 2015 election they still got 8% of the vote.

But of course, the British were told not to have proportional representation… many in the Netherlands don’t vote for Geert Wilders’ party because they’ve seen him in parliament… which means they’ve seen the reality, where the British haven’t had the chance, and so people can retain their illusions.

Well, that is the basis of secure propaganda, isn’t it? Make sure that everybody assumes they’re going to get what they want, and are happy that their neighbours will get what they want too (even if, in reality, they want very different things – they aren’t going to know this because they won’t ever find out!!) Everybody’s happy just as long as the ball is kept rolling.

PS the range of the Airbus 320neo is 4000 nautical miles (considerably more than 4000kms).

I wonder if Grant Schapps delayed his resignation sufficiently so that the media did not pick up again his fairly recent no doubt taxpayer paid for trip to the Cayman Islands, did he open/close any bank accounts/business entities there? Obviously solely for research purposes in the Tory gov. Crusade against their enemy (I am attempting irony folks) the Tax Dodger!

Ricoh, if you say that “29,660 litres – 30 tonnes”, obviously your understanding of specific gravity of a liquid is somewhat limited.

However, the wikipedia entry states that the fuel capacity is between 24,000l and 30,000l depending as to which variant of the Airbus 320 you’re talking about. Now when you consider that kerosene is lighter than water, your figures would have to be adjusted a little downwards. By how much, you can find out on any data-sheet concerning kerosene-based airline fuels. I am certain that you will have access to these. This is why there was such a large discrepancy between your figures and mine (and please remember that if Airbus had used your figures, the payload of the aircraft would be almost wiped out).

But please remember that my calculations weren’t based on the A320. My calculations were based on the latest model of the 320 series, the neo. In future, I would appreciate people reading my posts with the care that they were written with.

What none of the above commenters helped me with was the European aircraft industry’s daily consumption of fuel; instead they chose to pick a detail and even then, got their facts muddled. But I’d still like to know how much fuel is consumed on a daily basis by European flights.

I don’t mind Corbyn’s naive Miss World idealism, I don’t mind him expressing it, and I don’t mind him trying to get others to go along. The Labour MPs who want to stage a coup, are the useless wimps who put him and the other third-raters on the ballot sheet in the first place, so they don’t deserve any support at all, they got what they invited.
I don’t mind Red Ken telling us these suicide bombers are freedom fighters, they are certainly motivated enough against something to die for the cause. Not many of the rest of us are, I suspect. If we want to do something serious about suicide bombers, we need to go heavily against where they are being brainwashed from childhood.
Just cos I don’t mind Corby and Livingstone trying to get their opinions heard, doesn’t mean I will vote for them or their friends.
The soft left might stir up a soft right in opposition, just as a hard left, if it gains ground, will stimulate a hard right against them. I think I would rather wobble about between left and right moderates, pity there isn’t such a thing as a hardline moderate; maybe that’s what the Liberal Party were supposed to be.

I actually don’t know why people like Cameron, Schapps, Osbourne are in politics for, they don’t have any great mission statements and it can’t be for the money or the praise or the glamour. (maybe Osbourne has a little vision, but he’s the guy bankrupting the country)

I don’t mind Corbyn’s naive Miss World idealism, I don’t mind him expressing it, and I don’t mind him trying to get others to go along. The Labour MPs who want to stage a coup, are the spineless wimps who put him and the other third-raters on the ballot sheet in the first place, so they don’t deserve any support at all, they got what they invited.
I don’t mind Red Ken telling us these suicide bombers are freedom fighters, they are certainly motivated enough against something to die for the cause. Not many of the rest of us are, I suspect. If we want to do something serious about suicide bombers, we need to go heavily against where they are being brainwashed from childhood.
Just cos I don’t mind Corby and Livingstone trying to get their opinions heard, doesn’t mean I will vote for them or their friends.
The soft left might stir up a soft right in opposition, just as a hard left, if it gains ground, will stimulate a hard right against them. I think I would rather wobble about between left and right moderates, pity there isn’t such a thing as a hardline moderate; maybe that’s what the Liberal Party were supposed to be.

I actually don’t know why people like Cameron, Schapps, Osbourne are in politics for, they don’t have any great mission statements and it can’t be for the money or the praise or the glamour. (maybe Osbourne has a little vision, but he’s the guy bankrupting the country)

Staying on oil & Osborne’s corp tax cut,with oil prices falling all that changes is where the profit is extracted,that is now at the pump worldwide & therefore taxed on countries tax levels,hence the drop in corp tax !

Thankyou, Ricoh – my figures took a figure of around 0,79. But it does vary. Nevertheless, it is a very large amount of fuel – how many times is an aircraft refuelled each day? I remember as a kid the bowsers being brought to the side of the DC 8s and 707s at just about every airport we touched down on – jet engines were far less efficient in those days.

However, my question still stands: does anybody know how much fuel is used by the aircraft industry per day? After all, the amounts must be colossal.

I had to study that a little carefully, as they should have labelled the abscissa “millions of barrels per day” rather than “thousands of barrels per day” and then marking the axis in thousands…

With 5 million barrels per day in 2010, that’s around 600,000 tons per day (1litre = 790gm).

In terms of fuel additives, if there was a 1% additive, that’d be around 6,000 tons of additive per day. No wonder the contrail guys call aircraft “tankers”. It would appear that they carry more fuel than they do payload!

Just a small question why have those wicked wee ISIS people not so much as chucked a stone on to Israel territory.
Why go all the way to Paris when your number one enemy is so close. Just puzzled that’s all.

thank you JW. Routeral the answer is that Israel is the conduit (from turkey) for ISIS oil. They send it on to europe. I find that Mr.Corbyn has both integrity and principles and no slime. He acts like a true human being. Regardless of policy etc. he comes up as real gold whereas all the other slaves of the usa are slime balls who keep telling us that their fake gold is real.

In reply to several previous posts, the rich don’t need, and generally don’t want to get richer for the sake of more money, getting richer is purely a bi-product of keeping the masses as poor as church mice, which they must do at all costs if they are to preserve their own wealth and position of privilege.

The rich need the great mass of people to stay poor, stay on the hamster wheel and not to have time to think how badly they are getting stiffed every single day, and especially not allow them time or resources to understand that they don’t need the rich and privileged.

Every so often some lucky guy or gal is chosen and picked from obscurity and made rich beyond their dreams, and certainly beyond their own capabilities, purely to keep the dream alive. “Heh look, if you study hard, work hard, don’t rock the boat, protect the staus quo, risk everything including your health then you too could become the next Zuckerberg”. But it’s not possible, not even remotely possible for 99,9999%

Glory Days, rich people are rich because they need money as a protection from the outside world. They know that money means they can do as they please, and not be troubled by those who don’t want them to do as they please.

There is a downside, and that is for a person with this kind of psychological shortcoming, there’s never enough money. Once they’ve amassed a hundred thousand, there’s always something they ‘need’ that costs more. That’s when they need a quarter of a million. Then it’s a million, five million or ten, a hundred… it’s like a heroin junkie who has gotten to the point where they can’t enjoy a morning cup of coffee without first having a hit.

Being rich is an addiction just like any other.

If you’re not rich, and you’ve got your life straight, think yourself lucky. Because being rich looks nice, but it hides a lot of fears.

Gemma, it’s about keeping people down, I know because I do it myself in my own business, and I’m not even rich. I never thought I would have such an attitude but it’s come down to dog eat dog if you want to survive.

I sweated blood for years to save enough capital to start up, and the last thing I want to do now is pay my workers enough so they can go out and rip me off by taking my training, knowledge, processes, documentation, templates and customers with them when they leave. Starve them of enough money so they never have enough capital to become a competitor. Loading them up with debt is even better.

On a bigger scale we haven’t just seen it with lower salaries, longer hours and more debt, we’ve seen it with regulations and red tape that makes the small players unable to compete with the big boys, there are so many examples it’s untrue, abattoirs come to mind for example, the small ones got forced out as a result of lobbying for bulls**** regulations by the big boys.

When we ran a building firm, we paid our guys more than the going rate because for 10% extra pay, we easily got that much work from them – and it was done willingly. There’s no way I’d hammer them, because they could hammer our jobs, contracts and clients, just by turning up late, doing poor work or whatever.